Author’s Note
This essay begins a series about firsts.
I came out in my forties with a platinum Amex, hotel points, miles, and access to the Delta Sky Club. Which is to say, I didn’t skip gay adolescence. I just arrived late, with the time, privacy, and resources that adulthood quietly provides.
What follows across this series are honest accounts of those delayed firsts: first hookups, first trips to New York, Provincetown, and Key West, first gay bars, first dark rooms, first time checking my clothes at the door. Experiences many gay men encounter in their teens and twenties, I experienced at forty-five, while holding a professional life, a family, and responsibilities that don’t pause for self-discovery.
This isn’t nostalgia or regret. It isn’t instruction or ideology. It’s curiosity, indulgence, miscalculation, joy, embarrassment, and relief. It’s what happens when desire finally gets room to move.
Think of it as gay adolescence, experienced out of sequence.
The First Time
I didn’t have much original material to work from.
Like most people, my expectations were shaped by television, movies, and porn. I knew, broadly, what men did with each other. I knew what I wanted. Bottoming had always been the fantasy. That part felt settled long before anything else did, as if my body had been quietly filing paperwork my mind hadn’t yet reviewed.
What I didn’t know was how to prepare in a way that felt compatible with the person I already was. At forty-five, I wasn’t reckless or naïve. I was competent. I had spent decades being good at things, making decisions, managing consequences. So I did what I always do when facing uncertainty. I researched.
I moved between wildly different sources: How to Bottom Like a Pornstar, The Joy of Gay Sex, and eventually books written by surgeons, including Dr. Evan Goldstein’s Butt Seriously. My healthcare background refused to stay quiet. Pleasure was fine. Precision mattered more. There was something both absurd and comforting about approaching desire with the same seriousness I brought to any unfamiliar procedure.
I assumed my first time would be awkward. I imagined it would be with someone from an app because I didn’t personally know any other candidates. I knew, mostly from a very awkward scene in the HBO series It’s a Sin, that douching was involved. That detail had never occurred to me organically, which feels revealing now. So much of what we think of as “sexual knowledge” is really just cultural shorthand passed down without explanation.
What I didn’t imagine was that my first time would be with a married couple.
It was a long New Year’s weekend. I was at a gated resort with my family. My ex-wife and I were already separated, but the trip had been planned long before, and we’d met my parents there. I was still inhabiting multiple lives at once: a husband in the process of becoming something else, a son on vacation, a professional who never really clocked out. I made a judgment call that in an expensive, insular vacation community, hooking up with other guests felt relatively low risk. Adulthood has a way of lending confidence to decisions that are still, at heart, impulsive.
I met one of them on Grindr, the other on Scruff. After a few exchanges, it became clear they were a couple. They were open. They came here often. Hooking up while on vacation was part of the rhythm of the place. What many straight people keep safely in the realm of fantasy was, for them, simply how weekends worked.
It moved quickly. A few messages. Some photos. A plan for that afternoon. Drinks and “fun” at the house they’d rented. Once the plan existed, I felt no ambivalence. I couldn’t wait. Desire, when it’s been deferred long enough, doesn’t negotiate much once it’s finally given a window.
If anything unsettled me, it was the scale of it. This would be my first time bottoming, and I had decided to do it with two people. Somewhere in the conversation I learned they lived less than an hour from my home in Virginia. That detail registered, then drifted away. It would return later, the way certain facts always do, after the moment has passed.
What I was afraid of wasn’t moral collapse or regret. It was practical. I was afraid I would have an accident. That, and that I wouldn’t be able to take it. These were not abstract fears. They were bodily, humiliating, specific. The kinds of fears people don’t tend to write essays about, but absolutely carry with them.
I had prepared. I had read. I had practiced with toys. I knew, in theory, what was required. It turns out How to Bottom Like a Pornstar was the most practically useful guide I encountered. I appreciated the specificity and reassurances of the medical books (particularly the parts where physicians confirmed this would not, in fact, kill me), but Pornstar aligned more closely with where my fantasy lived. At some point, preparation gives way to decision. I knew I was ready. I decided to let go and stop thinking.
Their house looked like it belonged to two men. Groceries for the weekend were laid out on the counter. A candle was lit. There was an ease to the space that surprised me. I had brought wine, the way you do when you’re meeting someone for the first time and want to appear normal. I felt comfortable almost immediately. I noticed, with quiet relief, a giant can of Metamucil on the counter. Domesticity has a way of disarming fear.
We talked. The kind of talking people do when they’re just getting to know one another. We were all surprised to realize how close we lived to each other in real life. That familiarity settled me. There was something grounding about discovering that these weren’t avatars or fantasies but people with grocery lists and neighborhoods and routines. When one of them moved closer and started kissing me, whatever tension remained disappeared. I knew I would be okay.
I wasn’t naïve about what was going to happen. I didn’t load the moment with the kind of meaning I probably would have at twenty. I never told them it was my first time. That felt unnecessary. At forty-five, inexperience didn’t feel like deficiency. It felt like timing. When we moved to the bedroom, something shifted. Not identity. Attention. I stopped narrating the experience to myself. I was inside it.
There’s something particular about experiencing a first while already fully formed elsewhere in your life. I wasn’t discovering who I was. I already knew that. I was discovering what my body had been waiting for. Adolescence, compressed and accelerated, hits differently when you’re not worried about reputation, or being found out, or what this means for the rest of your life. The stakes are lower and higher at the same time.
Afterward, my first thought was simple and almost incredulous: I had just been fucked by two men.
I felt proud. Not in a triumphant way. In a grounded one. I had tested the hypothesis. I had arranged this myself. The world hadn’t ended. It had felt amazing. Nothing catastrophic had happened. I felt the same quiet satisfaction I’d felt at sixteen after losing my virginity. A threshold crossed. A box checked.
The ending, though, was anticlimactic. They showed me the bathroom. Offered the shower. Asked if I needed anything. It was kind, but efficient. This was fun for them. A release. They had been together since college. They loved each other. They had navigated coming out together, built a life, accumulated history. This was something they shared easily. When it was done, it was thanks, we had fun, let’s do this again sometime.
That transactionality lingered with me more than I expected. Not as disappointment, exactly. More as awareness. I was the guest in someone else’s intimacy, temporary by design. At forty-five, you’re capable of holding pleasure and distance at the same time. You don’t need everything to be permanent for it to be meaningful.
Driving back to the house my family had rented, I felt both secretive and strangely ordinary. I told everyone I’d run an errand. I felt like anyone who looked at me could tell, which was almost certainly untrue. I literally and figuratively carried the experience with me quietly, like a private confirmation.
What stayed with me wasn’t shame. It was confidence. I felt real in a way I hadn’t before. Not more masculine. Not transformed. Just steadier. It showed me that even though I didn’t look like the men I was usually attracted to, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be attracted to me. I would be okay. I could meet people. I could have connection on whatever terms we agreed to.
I told the one gay friend I had met so far that I’d finally checked the box. It turned out he had been invited into their home before too. That shared recognition felt grounding, almost tender. Proof that this world had patterns and pathways I was only just beginning to see.
This feels like the right place to begin because the fear underneath it is universal. The first hookup. The risks. The questions no one says out loud. Will anyone want me? Will I be good at this? What if something goes wrong?
So much of coming out can remain theoretical for years. Conversations. Labels. Self-acceptance. This couldn’t. This required a body. This meant I was fully gay in the most unabstract way possible. I had been fucked by two men and loved it. I finally understood why people are so obsessed with sex.
For a long time, I genuinely wondered what the big deal was.
Then I knew.
I’m sure they’ve likely forgotten me by now, but I will always remember the two of them and my first time.
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Thank you for this Caleb. This speaks so much to my own experience coming out at 58. I love that you use the term adolescence rather than others that can still perpetuate the shame